Ceremony of the Honorary Doctorate to be awarded to Jonathan Seth Dordick

Biography

Stuart B. Schwartz was educated at Middlebury College and the National University of Mexico and received his MA and PhD from Columbia University (1968). He taught previously at the University of Minnesota and he is currently the George Burton Adams Professor of History at Yale University. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and twice an ACLS Fellow. He has been President of the Conference of Latin American History, member of the Council of the AHA, Presidential candidate for the AHA (2002); and co-editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review (1996-2001).

Stuart B. Schwartz specializes in the History of colonial Latin America, especially Brazil and on the history of early modern expansion. He has authored many books: Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil (1973); Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society (1984); Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels (1992); All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2008); Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina (2015). He was the co-author (with James Lockhart) of Early Latin America (1983) and the editor of A Governor and His Image in Colonial Brazil (1976); Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (1994); Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the making of the Atlantic World (2004). He served with F. Salomon as editor of the Cambridge History of Native Peoples of the Americas, Vol. 3, South America (2 vols. 1999).

He presently serves on the editorial board of 12 scholarly journals in seven countries. In 2000, he received the Order of the Southern Cross, Brazil’s highest decoration for foreigners,  in recognition of his contributions to Brazilian history. He holds four honorary doctorates from Brazilian and American universities and an honorary citizenship from the city of Salvador, Bahia, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012.